ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We thank Mr. L. Hordijk for the possibility to work with Zuurland arvicoline materials and for his great infective enthusiasm in ongoing studies on the Quaternary history of The Netherlands. We thank our colleagues C.J. Bell, R.A Martin, and V.S. Zazhigin for fruitful discussions on fossil arvicolines and for the access to the collections in their care. We also thank two reviewers for valuable corrections of the text. One reviewer raised a number of important questions on theory and practice of phylogenetic reconstructions in fossil voles. In answering some of these questions, we arrived at a better understanding of our arguments and problems.

This contribution is dedicated to the memory of Charles Repenning whose personal and scientific influence, inspiration, and advice we valued so highly during many years of our scientific communication. Research for this paper was supported financially by the Russian Foundation for Basic Research, project no. 06-05-64049 and by the program ONZ-14 of the Russian Academy of Sciences.